Vienna City Flats — Praterstr. 78

Sarah found this place for us online and she did a great job. It’s just a hop (no skip or jump required) to the Praterstern (a.k.a. Wien Nord) train station, which last time (Thanksgiving 2006) was merely a tram and subway stop. Now it’s a full-service train station. Simply put, the location of this apartment was an ideal compromise between accessibility and price. It was well-equipped, meeting all our basic requirements:

shower consisting of more than just a hose in the tub

generous kitchen with stove and fridge

accomodations for four

My only beef: they had one of those IKEA sofabed things that rolls out to unfold into a mattress, but it was either broken or we couldn’t figure out how to get it to remain a couch — it kept rolling itself out (good idea, bad implementation).

Nice touch: offering to let us stow the luggage at the apartment while it was being cleaned after our check-out until departing Vienna later that day. Could have saved us luggage lockers and airport/train station schlep and hassle.

Sarah

I love the location of this place. Located right across the street from the spankin’ new Praterstern/Wien Nord U-bahn, tram and ÖBB station, it’s a great base of operations for getting out and searching Vienna. For our purposes, it was pretty well equipped and the landlord and administrator were easy to get a hold of for when we had questions. In light of what a generally nice apartment it was, the thing with the rolling couch was kind of disappointing.

The neighborhood that the apartment is in might be an issue for some people. It’s definitely not posh. It looks like there’s a good mix of native middle-class Viennese and immigrants. There were a few drunks and beggars wandering around (plus lots of drunks at the train station, but that’s kind of par for the course), but no more than would be expected for a major European city. There is easy access on foot to grocery stores, bakeries and pharmacies – plus the bonus of the nearby train station is that there is some shopping available on Sunday.